


Trading Favours

by softplacetonest (aurorasparrowmist)



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Demons, Kandi bracelets, M/M, New Year's Eve, Rave, Seven Deadly Sins, background political machinations, demon-typical feral behaviour, ravebae kunten, unapologetic bastardization of cinderella, unapologetic bastardization of various underworld mythologies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-09
Updated: 2021-01-09
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:01:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28315704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurorasparrowmist/pseuds/softplacetonest
Summary: What was it they said about Cinderella? Something about three balls and a lost shoe.
Relationships: Chittaphon Leechaiyapornkul | Ten/Qian Kun
Comments: 8
Kudos: 34
Collections: NCTV Secret Santa 2020





	Trading Favours

**Author's Note:**

  * For [moonfleur](https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonfleur/gifts).



> merry christmas nee!

**Solstice**

Ten waits five minutes at the checkpoint between Ramsgate and Livingston before ultimately jumping the fence and heading towards Pandemonium. He doesn’t have the patience to wait in line, and what is life without its little shortcuts? The boundary seals surrounding Asphodel ping to note his arrival.

“There are formalities for a reason.”

“Shut the fuck up, Johnny.”

“Jaehyun isn’t gonna be happy you cut the line.”

“He and all his shadow copies can choke on Yukhei’s tentacle dick for all I care.”

The cambion melts out from the surrounding mist, clad in a sheer micro crop top and fuzzy leg warmers over his gogo boots, and slings an arm around Ten’s shoulders. Johnny’s left arm jangles with cuffs and kandi bracelets. Ten eyes a rotating cuff strung with demon lights and tiny cheetah charms in between the pony beads—meticulously made, and obviously a gift.

“What are you, fucking proposing?” Ten knew this quasi non-courtship with Mark was serious, but he didn’t know it was serious enough for Johnny to use the handcrafted-crystal beads he nabbed sometime in the 1400s.

Johnny blushes to his ears. “It’s his first time. I want it to be special.”

The ground below them shifts, and Ten dodge a sudden spring trap of spikes protruding from the long grass. Yukhei’s work, it looks like—seems he’s been having fun with security measures. Johnny pulls an iron spike out of his abdomen that he didn’t manage to evade. Ten uses the distraction to dance out of Johnny’s grip to walk backwards in front of him. “Gonna pop his cherry real good?” Ten coos. “Trade bracelets and friendship rings and move topside to steal five human babies to convert to the infernal agenda?”

Johnny grunts, cradling his side as the flesh wound heals over. He was always such a baby about his friendly fire. “We have fifteen miles left to walk. Don’t make me kill you and carry your body there.”

As if Johnny was fast enough to catch him. Ten has been around long enough to remember Taeil frogmarching a tiny petulant Youngho up to Phosphor Square for assignment, decades before he hit his first growth spurt and adopted Johnny as his business moniker. “ _You_ have five miles to walk.” Ten unfurls his wings. “I’m taking a detour.” He lifts into the air on the updraft of Johnny’s half-hearted curses.

From the sky, or whatever functions as a sky in this hellscape, Asphodel stretches out into infinity. It warps at the edges of Ten’s vision, dimensionally layering planes of souls over the barren plain of decaying flora that surrounds Pandemonium. Ten ducks under the plane of dispassionate goners and lights down in front of the molten luminescent heap of palpating energy that is the shining star of The Pit.

“You bitch,” one of Jaehyun’s shadow copies greets. His mirage flickers. “Would it be so much to wait in line like the rest of us?”

Ten lets his wings settle. They absorb into his back, leaving behind a tattooed blur of silver gossamer batwings. He takes the time to pull up his holographic thigh-highs from where they’ve bunched around his knees, sticking them to his skin with a bit of miasmic witchery, and to adjust the perlers around his neck and the kandi singles on his right arm.

Ten eyes the shallow dimple on Jaehyun’s cheek and the tired glaze of his pupils. “You should ask for some time off, baby,” Ten simpers. He pokes Jaehyun’s cheek, causing the illusion to fritz. “Your conjures are not up to your usual standards—I can barely see these little cuties!” Ten knows for a fact that Jaehyun has at least fifty copies of himself running around Hell at any given moment, and he makes a mental note to put a complaint form through to Infernal Resources.

Jaehyun sighs, used to Ten’s evasion tactics and clearly too overworked to give even a token protest to the benevolent harassment. He pulls an overlarge tome out of the void—pastel pink and decked out in jigglypuff perlers—and hefts it open with a mild grunt “Just get in,” Jaehyun says, checking Ten’s name off the list.

The ground before him sinks open, the crumbling earth reforming into a yawning prismatic staircase lit up from underneath with witchlight and will-o’-wisps. Ten smiles. Into the belly of the beast.

“Let me know when Johnny finally gets here, will you? I want to see him make an ass of himself.”

Jaehyun scoffs. “Damn, what do you wanna bet that Mark still thinks this is all kosher?”

“Fool’s bet,” Ten calls back as he glides towards the stairs. Privately, Ten thinks Mark’s making Johnny sweat a bit. Little Markie got sent to the rack for greed, and he never truly grew out of his magpie appetite and his gold-digging sadism. It doesn’t help that Johnny has a praise kink the size of Tartarus and caves every time Mark turns his big soulless eyes in his direction. 

The descent begins to pull at every sarcomere of Ten’s muscles. EDM pulses upwards in a seductive croon of synths and 808s. Ten shoots Jaehyun one last distracted wave before the ground closes back up above him, leaving behind a smooth glass ceiling that allows a clear view of the pseudo-sky. 

The heat of the club sinks into Ten’s bones as enters Pandemonium. Smokey mist greets his body like a lover. “You shouldn’t be here,” it tells him in Sicheng’s voice. “They won’t be happy if they find out.”

Ten makes his way to the dance floor, twisting himself in between undulating bodies and glitter. The lasers glance across the ground and across faces in time with the music, lighting up glamoured faces and malignant mouths. The synths ascend, drawing Ten’s arms above his head like a compulsion. His hips grind low, against air and lust and whichever body that draws close enough to touch. The lights flash low, bathing Ten in cobalt silver shadows.

A hand twists into his hair, pulling him in until his forehead rests against anothers, and Ten blinks open his eyes to Mark’s blank gaze.

“Where’s Johnny?”

“He’ll be here soon,” Ten says. He smiles as he feels the scrap of claws and a small slip of parchment being tucked into the hip of his hotpants. Mark runs a perfunctory hand down Ten’s ass and under his thigh to mask the exchange.

In return, Ten grasps one of his kandi necklaces and lifts it over his head as he performs the customary PLUR gestures agaisnt Mark’s unresponsive palm—Plague, Larceny, Usury, Ruin.

“What the fuck is this?”

Ten bounces to the pounding bass as he loops the kandi over Mark’s head. “Spiderman,” Ten says, tapping the perler pendant. “Cute little character those topside roaches invented.”

Mark snarls down at the kandi. He won’t be able to access the seal embedded in the elastic cord of the necklace until the solstice rave is over and he’s far out from Pandemonium

Ten laughs, pulling Mark closer. “Dance with me.”

They sink into each other, familiar with the cut of each others joints and their bruising touches. Eons ago, Ten had been the one to lure Mark’s pious soul down to hell. Mark had met him first at the crosroads as a shaking monastic noviciate desperate to save his church from poverty, and he had met him again on the rack as a fraud unapologetic of the greed he had cultivated in ten years of life given to him. Ten had been the one to break him down until he rose from the rack, noxious and screaming.

A ping, a whisper in his ear—“Idiot’s here,” Jaehyun’s voice says. 

Ten whirls away from Mark. “Say hi to prince charming for me,” he calls back as he makes his way to higher ground to watch Johnny’s lovelorn fumblings. He never quite makes it.

Hands pull him at the waist, poison-tipped claws carving down his back and pressing into the glamour. Ten can feel his wings protesting the intrusion, and he tamps down the instinct to unfurl his wings to its full breadth. He leans into the touch, eyes feral. He can almost feel the fingers curving over the skeleton of his wings through his skin.

“Asmodeus.”

“Your Grace,” Ten purrs. “How may I serve you tonight?”

Kun growls. The music turns to something sultry, brass and guitar synths humming behind his knees and under his wrists. The lights laze across the Kun’s face, milky through the haze of smoke and blurring the sharp edges of Kun’s horns. His hair is slicked back, wet-looking like he had only risen from his oceanic depths for the privilege of Ten’s presence.

“What the fuck were you doing with Mammon?”

“Is this all for me?” Ten croons, pointedly ignoring the question at hand. He runs his fingers under the cut of Kun’s vellum vest and over his chest under the scaled mesh shirt. Ten leans in and licks a long stripe over the ragged lines of scars that etch out his closed gills. It tastes sweet, like seafood and rot. “I’ve missed you.”

“Asmo—” 

“Call me by my christian name and I’ll call you by yours, baby.”

“Ten,” Kun grits out. “Why were you with Mark?”

“Call it a favour.” Ten smiles, tipping his head back with hooded eyes. He slips a thigh between Kun’s, pressing his hips close and drawing him in until Ten was tucked between the folds of Kun’s open vest. He can taste Kun’s pulse under his tongue, slow and heavy like a whale’s. The kandi on his wrists click against the strings of seaglass and driftwood strung across Kun’s body like a harness. 

“Tell me,” Kun demands, tightening his grip on Ten’s back. The hidden parchment burns a brand into the skin of Ten’s hip.

The witching hour rings.

“That’s my cue,” Ten whispers.

The witching hour rings.

Ten presses his tumb against the seal on his right wrist and pulls out a kandi cuff, waved and stacked to resemble the geomorphology of coral reefs. He slips it over Kun’s wrist and settles it just above his elbow.

The witching hour rings.

Ten pulls back, twisting out of Kun’s unforgiving grip, and spreads his wings. They glimmer silver soft in flashing lights, wavering in the heat like one of Jaehyun’s mirages.

The witching hour rings.

Ten pulls his wings back, heedless of the demonic bodies caught in the upstroke, and lifts up on the downstroke. The ground above his opens up to the night sky, red and bleeding with souls.

The witching hour rings.

Ten leaves Pandemonium behind.

**Author's Note:**

> here is a salad bowl mix of references to various underworld myths, abrahamic texts, and demonic classifications. there's nothing like pastel and the profane.
> 
> [twt](https://mobile.twitter.com/aurasparrowmist) | [cc](https://curiouscat.me/aurasparrowmist)


End file.
